Day vs. Gately: the macramé-sampler riff
Now I live by the dictates of macramé samplers ordered from the back-page ad of an old Reader’s Digest or Saturday Evening Post. […] Good old Norman Rockwell–Paul Harvey wisdom. I walk around with my arms out straight in front of me and recite these clichés. In a monotone. No inflection necessary.
Context
Day sharpens the attack from content to source: the slogans aren't just simple, they're kitsch — needlepoint sampler, Reader's Digest, Norman Rockwell, Paul Harvey, the whole middlebrow-Americana image-bank hip irony was built to escape. To live by them is to go zombie ("arms out straight… In a monotone. No inflection necessary"), sincerity figured as lobotomy. It's a precise map of what the ironist fears sincerity will cost him: not error but the surrender of the self-aware inflection that irony is made of. And he can't stop — he offers "No inflection necessary" to the cliché-pool, still being clever in the very sentence indicting cleverness.